Political allegiance
A study conducted last year found that people who give their allegiance to a political party judge political statements using the parts of their brains generally associated with emotional responses rather than those that are engaged during reasoning.
This rings true to me: if you join a political party, you assert that the views held by the party are, more or less, representative of your views too. Given that assumption, a criticism of the party amounts to a personal criticism, making an emotional response more likely than a rational one. It also stands to reason that the more committed one is to a party, the more pronounced this effect would be.
This shines some light upon the blogs of people like Neil Harding, who often says sensible things, but occasionally comes out with such completely and utterly moronic shit that surely only cognitive dissonance can be to blame:
It terms of low level punishment for low level crimes, it is BETTER to punish the innocent than to let the guilty go free.
A man found with 10,000 in cash late at night with no reasonable explanation DESERVES prosecution regardless of whether the police can actually PROVE it is the result of wrongdoing.
All because of his undying love for the Dear Leader. The mind boggles, and rapidly concludes that all the parties are wrong as often as they are right (or, indeed, more), and that party independence is the only sensible choice.
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August 6th, 2007 at 18:02
[…] recently posted about the partisan brain, and about how Neil Harding rather exemplifies it. It seems he was all too eager to offer up […]